


the sun rises & falls with you (& various things about love)

by pentaghastly



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Corgi BB-8, F/M, im so sorry but im not?????, let them be happy and loved, luke is rey's foster dad i guess, out here in the arizona desert we uh........ fall in love, rey is 19 and poe is uhhh probably about 22?, this is a roommate au that no one asked for and it's so. fuckgnd s of t.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 11:45:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17866655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentaghastly/pseuds/pentaghastly
Summary: When Rey is seventeen, she has what most psychologists would call ‘a complete and total breakdown’.(This is a not-very polite way of saying that she runs away from home.)[OR, Rey is new in town, and it getsbetterworse.]





	the sun rises & falls with you (& various things about love)

**Author's Note:**

> this is pure, indulgent fluff for my achey-breaky heart
> 
> probably should have been a poly fic but! maybe next time kids.

When Rey is seventeen, she has what most psychologists would call ‘ _a complete and total breakdown_ ’. 

(This is a not-very polite way of saying that she runs away from home.)

The thing is – the thing is that she’s finished high school and she’s practically a legal adult, so it really shouldn’t matter, and you can’t _really_ run away from home if ‘home’ is a foster house, and she knows that Luke will understand. From what she’s gathered he’s had his fair share of breakdowns himself.

She’s tired of being surrounded by _people_ , people who know her without knowing her at all. She’s tired of feeling trapped – Luke is kind and Leia is kind and Han is… _Han_ , and they’re wonderful and they love her and they’re something, but they’re not enough.

When Rey is seventeen, she’s tired of not knowing who she is.

So she has a breakdown, and she runs as far away as she can manage.

She gets a tattoo. She sleeps in hostels in Amsterdam and bunks with people who barely speak English and they become her best friends; she sends Luke a postcard from every city she visits and he never replies but that’s okay, she thinks, because she’d be somewhere else by the time the letter got there anyways (and it’s his fault for refusing to buy a cellphone).

She meets Finn, Finn from Phoenix, Finn with the kind smile and the bright eyes, and pieces of her life start to stitch back together.

She applies for university in Arizona.

She gets in.

A year and a half after running away from home, she starts her life again.

 

.

 

“I just really wish,” Rey sighs, one hand pressing her phone to her ear, the other uselessly fanning her face, “someone had warned me how _hot_ it could get here before I moved. I mean –” 

“It’s a desert, kid. I don’t know what you expected.” 

“I didn’t think it was a _desert_ desert.”

Luke sighs on the other line – he’d finally caved and bought a cellphone when she officially moved, an old Nokia that works only fifty percent of the time and suits him perfectly. He claims to hate it, but the dozens of texts he sends her daily suggests otherwise. 

“What other kind of desert would it be?” She can hear him fiddling with something on the other end, hear R2 meowing, and is overcome with a feeling she barely recognizes. _Loneliness_. “If you want to come home it’s – your room’s free, kid.”

She loves him.

Rey loves him, and sometimes that’s not enough, and she’s about to tell him as much when she approaches the door of the apartment she shares with Finn and hears barking.

Which wouldn’t be concerning, really, if a dog was something they had.

“ _Shit_ – can I call you back, Luke?” She doesn’t wait for him to answer, because there’s someone unfamiliar in her apartment and they’ve brought a _dog_ , and Rey’s sure that it’s a friend of Finn’s but she’s just coming home from an all-nighter studying art history and she really, really isn’t in the mood for strangers.

So she opens the door quietly as she can, hoping she can just sneak to her room before anyone notices her presence, but just as she’s bending down to remove her shoes she’s jumped.

Jumped by a _corgi_.

(Rey hadn’t even known they could jump at all.)

It’s all a blur – a blur of kisses and barks and fur, _everywhere_ , but it’s very difficult to be upset about any of it when a very cute dog is acting like seeing her is the best thing to happen to him all day.

Then his owner rounds the corner, and it’s very difficult to be anything at all.

Because… _wow_.

“ _Fuck_ , I’m so sorry, he’s not usually like this with strangers.” The man picks up the dog like it’s nothing, keeping it firmly in place even when it struggles to wiggle out of his grip – he’s strong, Rey notes, and then wonders why she cares at all, and then realizes he’s still talking and she hasn’t heard a word. “Bee’s normally much more polite than that, I promise. You’re okay, right?”

There’s a pause, and it takes Rey a minute to figure he’s waiting for her to speak – she’d been too distracted trying to piece together how Finn even knows someone like him in the first place.

“Brilliant.” He’s still looking at her, expectant, _patient_ , and because she doesn’t know what else to do she smiles. “I love dogs.”

“Good. I don’t trust people who don’t.” 

Now he’s smiling too, and it’s _lovely_ – his eyes crinkle at the corners just so and Rey had never known that brown could be such a vibrant colour, so soft and sweet, or that it could feel so much like home.

“Poe Dameron.” He’s offering her his hand, still clutching the dog tight to his chest, and she’s always found handshakes stiff and awkward but this feels anything but. “I work with Finn.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” she says, although that really doesn’t seem to cover it. “I’m Rey.”

“I know.”

He _knows_.

He knows and he’s still smiling – smiling even brighter than he was before, which she hadn’t thought was possible, and all of a sudden Rey is overcome with the feeling that something is happening here far beyond anything she could have prepared herself for. Far beyond anything she’s ever known.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, and she takes a step back towards the door. “I’ve just remembered. I’ve got to go.”

And she does the thing she’s always been best at.

Rey runs.

.

She doesn’t come back until ten that evening, having spent the whole day in a café wallowing in her embarrassment, and when she gets home Finn is sitting on the cough waiting for her.

(Now _this_ she should have expected.)

“You broke Poe.”

“I _what_?”

“You _broke_ him!” Finn throws his arms up in the air as if to accentuate his point, but if anything the dramatics of the gesture just makes Rey more confused.

“I spoke to him for less than a minute.” She keeps her tone carefully steady as she steps into the living room, fully aware of Finn’s eyes trained on her. “I don’t think anything I said could have _broken_ a fully grown man.”

“He introduced himself and you ran away!”

_Oh._ Rey didn’t know why she’d hoped that he might have kept that part a secret.

“Obviously I didn’t realize he told you that.”

“Obviously,” Finn echoes, and he’s still staring at her far too intensely for her liking. Sometimes she likes that it feels as though Finn can see right through her – other times it’s a nightmare. “What happened?”

A loaded question, with multiple answers.

What happened was that she had practically fallen in love with him at first sight, which is far too embarrassing to admit to. 

What happened was that she was an awkward nineteen year old faced with a very handsome man and his very affectionate dog, and instead of functioning like a normal human being she’d panicked and booked it out the door.

What happened was that she was an _idiot_ , although Rey knew she didn’t really have to tell Finn that much. He knew well enough for himself by now.

“Nothing happened.” She tucks her legs underneath herself as she sits in the armchair, careful to avoid meeting Finn’s gaze. “Honestly, I didn’t mean to be rude. I just felt…hot.”

“You felt hot.”

“Arizona is much hotter than Washington. Or England. Or most places in the world, actually.”

“We have air conditioning. If you felt hot why would you – _oh_.”

_Oh._ She doesn’t like the sound of _oh_. Especially not when it’s coming from her all-too perceptive, idiot of a roommate.

“Don’t _oh_ me.”

He ignores her, which is the right thing to do – if Rey were him she would certainly be ignoring herself. “ _Oh!_ ”

The look on his face is almost gleeful, like a young child who’s just discovered his new favourite toy. It’s the happiest Rey’s seen him since she’s known him, and she really wishes it wasn’t at the expense of her pride. 

“I’m going to bed,” she says, but she can barely hear herself over his cackling. “Wake me up when you’re done being an arse.” 

“Rey, wait! _Fuck_ , there’s something – ” 

He’s still giggling as she slams the door in his face.

Somehow, it’s the best sleep she’s had in days.

.

Poe Dameron is making coffee when she wakes up.

It’s incredible, really, how she’d lived with Finn for weeks and not seen him for a second, and then suddenly he’s there every time she opens her eyes. There’s no dog this time, and for that she’s grateful – as cute as Bee was, she’s not in the mood to get accosted this early.

She’s not in the mood for _anything_ this early. Rey is hardly a morning person, and for all of their sakes she hopes that Finn hasn’t said a word about their late-night conversation to his friend. She’d hate to have to commit murder before she’s even had the chance to properly wake up.

And Poe Dameron is still making coffee in her kitchen.

He doesn’t glance up when she approaches, although she knows he’s aware of her presence – as light as Rey’s footsteps are, she still sees his head twitch slightly when she enters the room. 

“Can I get you a cup?” he asks, and his voice is as sweet as the sugar he’s dumping into his own mug.

( _Cheesy_. Rey’s never been disgusted by her own thoughts until now.)

“I’m alright, thanks.” She’d never got a taste for the stuff – Luke’d always said it tasted like jet fuel, and she was inclined to agree.

“You’re the only university student I know who’d turn down coffee.”

He’s smiling at her again, she realizes, and while it’s not as bright as yesterday it seems genuine enough. Not so broken after all, she thinks, and she’ll have to give Finn hell for trying to make her feel guilty yesterday when _clearly_ Poe was hanging in just fine.

“I’ve never been one for doing what’s expected.” She answers with a smile of her own, and Rey’s almost positive she’s not imagining the relief that flickers across his face. It’s gone as soon as it arrived, but she makes a mental note to think it over later. “Are you here for Finn? I could wake him, or – wait, how did you get inside?” 

“I’ve got a key,” he says, as if this is the most obvious answer on the planet.

“Have you always had a key?”

“If by ‘ _always_ ’ you mean ‘ _since I’ve lived here,_ ’ then yes.” 

“And you’ve lived here since when, exactly?”

“Well, if we’re being _exact_ ,” he looks down at his watch for half a second before bringing his gaze right back to her, amusement playing at the corners of his lips, “seven hours and thirty-one minutes ago. Did Finn not tell you?”

She trains her expression into something neutral, something calm, even though at the moment she feels anything but. “Is it obvious?” 

For his part Poe at least looks a bit sheepish, and she’s grateful that there’s only one person she has to kill. Rey knows she has no right to be as upset as she is – the lease is under Finn’s name, after all, and she’s only been there a handful of weeks herself, and she hadn’t been the most open to conversation the day before – but it still would have been nice to be given a bit of a fucking warning.

She’ll kill Finn, but she’ll kill him later, because right now the pressing issue is the man in her – _their_ – kitchen.

“ _Fuck_ , I’m so sorry. I swear it’s just temporary, my place has mold and they’re gutting the whole thing – that’s why we were here yesterday, to see if Bee would do okay here – he’s still asleep, the lazy slob – and if I’d known you weren’t cool with it I’d never – ” 

“Who says I’m not cool with it?” 

Rey doesn’t miss the surprise on his face, the way his dark eyes light up when they meet hers. “You sure?” 

She shrugs, acting much more casual than she feels. “I’ve always wanted a dog. Even if it’s just temporary.” 

They stand in silence for a moment or two, and it’s not quite comfortable but it’s amiable, _friendly_ , and the sun through the windows is hitting him in such a way that Rey can count the freckles on his cheeks, ones that she hadn’t even noticed were there to begin with. How hadn’t she noticed those before? She couldn’t imagine missing them now.

“ _Oh_. That reminds me.” 

Poe turns his back to her again, but it’s only a moment before he’s facing her with a mug clutched in his hands, and she’s overcome with an aroma of sweetness and warmth and something she hasn’t felt in ages.

It smells like home.

“I made it for you just in case the coffee was a bust. Finn mentioned you weren’t feeling well yesterday, and I thought it might help.” 

For a handful of seconds Rey simply holds it, and she’s sure that Poe must be getting concerned when he chimes in, “Really though, you don’t have to drink it if tea isn’t your thing. No pressure.”

She has to duck her chin to hide her smile.

“I love tea.”

(She’s certain he can see it anyways.)

.

They fall into a fragile routine, Poe and herself.

He wakes up early because he is, in his own words, “ _a go-getter,_ ” and Rey wakes up early because she has to and Finn doesn’t wake up until he absolutely has to – so she and Poe sit at the kitchen table and have breakfast together. Sometimes they’re quiet, other times not, but it becomes so cemented into her daily schedule that she can’t remember a time he wasn’t there.

She leaves for school and he leaves to take Bee for a walk, and they walk her to her bus stop before parting ways, and she almost never (almost always) watches them as they go.

Finn and Poe do whatever it is that firefighters do and Rey goes to her classes and tries not to worry about them, even though she knows that if two people can look after themselves it’s her roommates.

Roommates. _Plural_. 

She never thought she’d see the day.

She calls Luke on the bus ride home every evening and he pretends like he’s annoyed whenever she tried to make plans for him to come visit, but he tells her he’s looking at flights and he laughs when she squeals in excitement.

Bee kisses her face when she walks through the front door and he does an adorable little dance whenever she gets him his food and this, she thinks, is exactly what life is supposed to feel like. This is what she’d been chasing when she ran away from home, two years and twenty lifetimes ago.

On the nights that all three of them are home for dinner it’s usually Poe who cooks, because the only thing Rey can make is pasta and the only thing Finn can make is cereal, and it’s _nice_ , how they can sit and talk about everything and nothing at all.

She doesn’t miss the way Finn smiles to himself whenever her hand brushes against Poe’s for a little too long, or whenever they smile at each other a little too bright.

She doesn’t miss it, but Finn doesn’t say anything and she thinks she loves him for it.

At night they curl up on the cough and watch reruns of tv shows all three of them have seen, and she tucks herself into Poe’s side, feet on Finn’s lap, Bee curled up on the armchair that he’s claimed for himself (that they have to lift him up onto), and Rey doesn’t know why she’d ever want to be anywhere else.

And Poe is going to move out soon, she knows – _they_ know – but none of them ever talk about it.

That’s exactly the way she’d like to keep things.

.

“Did you know,” Poe asks when they’re in the kitchen one day, just the two of them, flour dusting his cheeks, “that I make the best pancakes in state of Arizona?”

“Somehow I struggle to believe that.”

“It’s true. I’ve won awards.”

The batter is looking an almost unnatural shade of yellow, and Rey’s afraid that if she were to touch it it’d come to life and swallow her whole. “Awards for being the worst liar south of Washington state?”

He presses one hand to his heart, feigning a wound, and she scoffs. “Are you suggesting that I’m lying?” 

“No.” She smiles at him, and he smiles at her, and her pause goes on a beat longer than it should. “I’m _saying_ you are.” 

“ _Ouch_. Are you trying to hurt my feelings? Because it’s working.”

It’s a lazy Sunday and Finn is at Rose’s and their apartment is an apocalyptic mess – Poe can cook but baking, clearly, is not where most of his talents lie, and in just ten minutes of trying to make breakfast he’s turned their kitchen into a war zone. 

It’s unfair, really. Nobody should look that good covered in batter.

“I think you need to actually have feelings in order for them to get hurt.” 

He points a finger at her, wagging it in her face before turning back to the task at hand. “You’re going to eat your words, sweetheart.” 

“As long as I’m eating _something_.”

He laughs, and Rey is struck again by an overwhelming, now-familiar feeling – that she loves him. 

She _loves_ him, which is incredibly inconvenient as she has sworn to never fall in love with anyone. It messes things up, people up, friendships up, and she can count in her head a million and one reasons why loving Poe Dameron is a terrible idea but all it takes is for him to smile at her and she forgets them all.

There’s a song filtering through the speakers they’ve got set up in the living room, slow and romantic, and she doesn’t miss the way Poe’s shoulders sway slightly to the rhythm, almost without realizing he’s doing so.

She knows this song. She knows it, but she can’t remember the name because the only thing she can focus on is Poe – Poe, humming along, off-key and one beat behind, a dimple in his left cheek where his half-smile is curling up. Poe, in his own world, a world where she desperately wants to join him.

Rey doesn’t think she’s ever wanted anything more.

“You should stay,” she says, because she feels as though she should.

He looks up at her, confused, and she can’t blame him for it – she doesn’t know what she’s doing either. “Wasn’t aware I was going somewhere.”

“Stay here, I mean. _Here._ ” She motions at the room around them as if to accentuate her point, a point that she wasn’t planning on making in the first place. “Living here must be better than living, alone, right? And who wants to live in an apartment with mold.” 

“Well,” he swallows, reaching up to awkwardly rub his cheek and leaving more flour in its place in the process, “the mold should be gone by the time I move back in.” 

“ _Should_ be.” 

“ _Will_ be.”

“And do you want to move back in?”

She hadn’t meant to make her words sound quite as accusatory as they do. Rey doesn’t want to keep him somewhere he doesn’t want to be, but she wants him to _want_ to be there – she wants Poe to realize that he’s wanted and she wants him to want her back, even if he doesn’t want her in the way she wants him to want her.

It’s all very complicated, and very messy, and she’s sure that Luke would be laughing at her if he could see her right now. She wants to laugh at herself, but she’s too focused on not crying.

“Do you want me to move back in?”

“I literally _just_ told you,” she says, speaking slow as if that will help make the conversation less insane, “that I think you should stay. That I _want_ you to stay.” 

“Why?”

_Why_?

She hadn’t expected him to ask her that. She hadn’t expected any of this conversation, in fairness, but even if she had expected it she wouldn’t have been able to predict the frustration in his voice, or the way his eyes seemed to search every square inch of her face, as if looking for an answer that she couldn’t put to words.

She hadn’t expected Poe Dameron, with his kind eyes and his gentle smile and his adorable fucking dog, currently sniffing at her feet for table scraps.

“Because you’re my friend, Poe.”

“I’m your friend,” he echoes, but Rey’s almost certain she didn’t say it the way he’s saying it now. She’s almost certain she didn’t sound quite so sad.

“Something like that,” she says, because she’s not sure what else there is to say.

“Something like that,” he repeats again, and she feels like she’s a child, like he’s mimicking her in the way Ben used to. “Sure, why not? Something’s better than nothing, I guess.” 

It doesn’t feel like that right now. Right now _something_ feels like a whole lot of nothing at all, and Rey stares down at the pancake batter in the bowl that sits in the middle of them – still lumpy and thick and almost certainly not how pancake batter is supposed to look – and frowns.

“Do we have any chocolate chips?”

Poe looks at her, incredibly soft and impossibly fond, and she thinks, not for the first time and likely not for the last – _I love him._

“I’m sure we’ve got something like that,” he replies, and he just barely manages to dodge the napkin she throws at his head.

She loves him.

Sometimes, she thinks, he just might love her back.

.

It’s six days later when he and Finn stumble home, reeking of alcohol and sweat and _testosterone_ , and while Finn half-walks, half-falls right into his bedroom Poe doesn’t hesitate to make his way over to the couch to sit down beside her.

“You smell awful,” she says, but she says it with love, and he doesn’t do anything more than hum in agreement.

She’d been planning on spending the entire night studying, hence why she hadn’t joined he and Finn on their little nighttime adventure, but now her space is invaded by a beautiful, drunk man with his beautiful, drunk smile, and his head is resting comfortably on her shoulder and Rey thinks – biochemistry can wait.

“I missed you,” he says, and God help her, she actually believes him. “None of the girls at the bar are as pretty as you. None of them smell as nice.”

“But if I’d gone out,” she runs her fingers through his hair as she speaks, gentle as she can, as if she’s afraid she might startle him away, “then I’d be drunk too, and there’d be no one left to make sure you two idiots don’t choke on your own puke.”

“Bee would.” The dog sighs, as if in reluctant agreement. “See?”

There are a lot of things that she could say in response, but she doesn’t say any of them – instead they sit for a while, content in quiet, her hands still in his hair, and when the silence is broken Poe’s voice is so soft that she almost thinks she might have imagined it.

“Two weeks,” he says, and she waits for an elaboration that never comes.

“Two weeks?”

“That’s how long my apartment’s been ready for. Two weeks.” He doesn’t sound as drunk as he had a moment ago, but the clarity in his voice is overshadowed by the weight that his words bring. “Well, two weeks and three days.”

_Two weeks and three days._ “And you’re still living here.”

“Going to be for a while, yeah. My lease was month to month, and I figured last month might as well be… _last_. You know?”

She doesn’t know. “So you moved out?”

“Because you asked me to stay.”

“On _Sunday_.” Sunday was not two weeks and three days ago. Sunday was far, _far_ more recent than that. “That’s not two weeks and three days.”

“And because I’m in love with you.” He says this like it’s something she should already know, like it’s simple, even though it is anything but. “There’s also that.”

Rey tries. She tries to think of an explanation for what he’s said other than the obvious one – that he’s telling the truth – but she can’t find anything that seems to match up. Two weeks and three days he’s stayed, in their cramped little apartment with two roommates and one bathroom and a shower that runs grey for the first five seconds, and he’s stayed because of her.

She can hear Finn snoring in the other room. She can see marks on the coffee table from the other night, when they’d tried playing Catan and all failed miserably. She can feel Poe’s curls fluttering against her cheek, just enough to tickle, smell the shampoo he uses (coconut) and the body wash she’d bought for him the other week (mahogany and teakwood). In the quiet, she can feel everything.

She can’t focus on anything but him.

“Somehow,” she says, thankful he’s been patient enough to give her time to think, “I struggle to believe that.”

Out of the corner of her eye she can see him smile. “Are you calling me a liar?”

“I’m calling you _drunk_.”

“Not that drunk.”

“Still drunk,” she says, and she reaches over to cover his hand with her own, to squeeze it just gently enough so that he’d understand what she’s trying to say – and he does, Rey knows he does. “If you’re still in love with me in the morning, you can tell me then.”

Rey stands, pressing a hand against his shoulder for support, and when he looks up at her he looks like he’s looking up at the sky. She’s never been looked at like that before, she thinks. She’s never _wanted_ anyone to look at her like that.

And then – Poe.

(And doesn’t that just sum it all up?)

“I will be,” he says, and when he smiles she smiles back.

“I know.”

.

Poe knocks on her door at exactly eight in the morning, and she knows it’s him because she can hear him trying to shoo Bee away.

Nobody should be able to look that good hungover, she thinks. Nobody _could_ , but Poe makes a rumpled gray t-shirt and sweats look like something from the pages of a magazine. It’s not fair.

He’s in love with her.

_How the fuck_ , Rey thinks, _did I manage that?_

“I made you tea,” he says, but his hands are empty.

“And?”

“And I left it in the kitchen.” He seems unsure, and Rey thinks that’s a first – in all the time she’s known Poe (really not that long at all, in the grand scheme of things) she’s never seen him looking anything other than completely confident. “Mostly because I was worried I’d get nervous and spill it on you.” 

“And the reason you would get nervous,” she says, and it’s taking everything in her to not laugh at the puppy-dog look on his face, “is that you’re in love with me.”

He’s quiet for a moment.

Two.

Rey’s pretty sure she can feel her heart skip a beat.

He _grins_.

“Something like that.”

She kisses Poe Dameron for the first time at five minutes after eight, and he tastes like coffee but somehow that’s not a bad thing – maybe it’s because it tastes like _him_ , and Poe Dameron tastes like home.

_Poe_. Poe from Phoenix. Poe, who loves her.

Rey is nineteen, and she doesn’t want to run anymore.


End file.
